n by birth was an excellent colourist. For one of his
pictures--the very 'Raising of Lazarus' now in the National Gallery,
which the Pope had ordered at the same time that he had ordered
Raphael's 'Transfiguration'--it is rumoured that Michael Angelo gave the
designs and even drew the figures, leaving Sebastian the credit, and
trusting that without Michael Angelo's name appearing in the work, by
the help of his drawing in addition to Sebastian's superb colouring,
Raphael would be eclipsed, and that by a painter comparatively obscure.

The unwarrantable inference that the whole work was that of one painter,
constituted a stratagem altogether unworthy of Michael Angelo, and if it
had any existence, its getting wind disappointed and foiled its authors.
When the story was repeated to Raphael, his sole protest is said to have
been to the effect that he was glad that Michael Angelo esteemed him so
highly as to enter the lists with him.

We can judge of Michael Angelo's attainments as a poet, even without
having recourse to the original Italian, by Wordsworth's translations of
some of the Italian master's sonnets, and by Mr John Edward Taylor's
translations of selections from Michael Angelo's poems.

Michael Angelo was greater as an architect and a sculptor than as a
painter, because his power and delight lay in the mastery of form, and
in the assertion, through that mastery, of the idealism of genius. It is
not necessary to speak here of the mighty harmonies and the ineffable
dignity of simplicity, somewhat marred by the departure from Michael
Angelo's designs, in St Peter's. It has been the fashion to praise them
to the skies, and it has been a later fashion to decry them, in awarding
a preference to the solemn shades and the dim rich dreaminess of Gothic
architecture. Both fashions come to this, after all, that beauty, like
these great men of genius of old, is many-sided.

In Michael Angelo's works of sculpture a weird charm attaches to his
monuments in honour of the Medici in the chapel of San Lorenzo,
Florence. Perhaps something of this weirdness has to do with the tragic
history of the men, and with a certain mystery which has always shrouded
the sculptor's meaning in these monuments.

Mrs Jameson quotes an account of Michael Angelo at work. An eye-witness
has left us a very graphic description of the energy with which, even in
old age, Michael Angelo handled his chisel:--"I can say that I have
seen Michael Angelo at